Judging Freedom - Warnings of Russia invading Ukraine - here's my discussion with Scott Horton about what's at stake

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

Warnings of Russia invading Ukraine - here's my discussion with Scott Horton about what's at stake#Russia #Ukraine #Putin #BidenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello there, everyone. Judge Napolitano here with Judging Freedom. My guest today is one of the strongest, most powerful, and most cogent voices against the aggressive use of the United States military in the country today, Scott Horton. Scott Horton from Antiwar.com, the author of two great books, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. Scott, it's a pleasure to see you. Welcome to Judging Freedom. Your Honor, thank you very much for having me. As we speak, the White House has leaked that it has put 8,500 American troops on ready, prepared to send them to Ukraine.

Under what conceivable constitutional or moral theory could they actually do so? Well, a small point of clarification there, sir, is that they're saying right now that they're prepared to send these troops to other Eastern European states such as the Baltic states or Poland or possibly Hungary, something like that, as essentially a symbol. But they have sworn that Joe Biden and his government has reaffirmed that Ukraine is not a member of NATO and our commitment to NATO is one thing and our commitment to them is something else. And that if Russia did invade, that we would hit them very hard with sanctions, which I don't think, one, that Russia is going to invade, to tell you the truth. And two, I would be opposed to even hitting them with sanctions. But I don't, honestly, I really don't think that there's a risk of Russia invading or certainly of America really getting into a war

with Russia. What do we care about the dispute between Russia and the Ukraine? And let's go back a little bit. How can the American public forget what the CIA and the American government did in 2014 when it engineered a coup against the popularly elected and relatively neutral government in Ukraine and installed a government favorable to the West. Certainly Vladimir Putin hasn't forgotten that. That's right. And of course, that is absolutely the operative point here, Judge. And you know that the answer is that TV just won't tell that part of the story to people. History always begins when they say it did. And that means that the other side are always the aggressors and America is always on the defense. And in fact, I think there really is, unfortunately,

an honest but crazy and false belief on the part of the American foreign policy establishment that wherever they spread their military alliance, all they're doing is spreading the umbrella of peace because everybody knows that no one would ever, ever mess with us. And so if no one would ever, ever mess with us, then the more people we bring into our alliance, the more deterred everyone is, the more peaceful the world is. And then if anyone reacts against that, namely the Russians in this case, they say, oh, see, aggression, aggression against us. This is the reason we have to defend Europe is because of the aggression of the Russians. When, of course, from the Russian

point of view, we're extending our literal military alliance right to their doorstep, including the Baltic states who are members of NATO. And with the Bucharest Declaration of 2008, George W. Bush promised to put Ukraine and former Soviet Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization here. And so you bring up exactly the right question how can the American people uh forget this or how can this be left out of the story that America really picked this fight and and the reason of course that they have to truncate all of this backstory judge is

because it's so obvious to any American that well what if the Russians were doing this in Canada overthrowing the government in Ottawa in a street putsch, hiring, using a bunch of violent Nazis to do it, and then declaring a war on terrorism against the people of British Columbia when they refused to accept the authority of the new coup junta. They just, America wouldn't put up with that for an instant. We'd go to nuclear war over that. But our government says that Vladimir Putin is this insane, psychopathic lunatic, would be Stalin. But we expect him to just sit there and take it as we encroach all the way right up to his borders. And you can see in his demands, he's saying he wants a promise of no further NATO expansion.

And he wants a promise that we won't put anti-ballistic missile missiles in Ukraine. And that's really the key judge because the anti-ballistic missile missiles, they're launched from the MK-41 missile launcher. And those same missile launchers can be used to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles tipped with hydrogen bombs. They're a dual use technology. And so if America puts in those anti-missile missiles in Ukraine the way they've done in Poland, this poses a direct existential threat to the Russian state. And you just can't read that in the Washington Post, but that's the truth. Right. Let me use the example of our mutual friend, Ron Paul. Suppose the Chinese had put these devices in Mexico at the southern, at the Mexico-Texas border. Wouldn't the United States be on the other side ready to defend?

I mean, isn't, Putin would be derelict in his duty if he didn't defend against this stuff, wouldn't he? That's right. And by the way, I want to go back to another great point that you made, sir, which is the relative neutrality of the president, the democratically elected president that America overthrew in 2014. He was ready to sign a deal with the European Union as a step of integrating with the West and eventually with NATO. And then they, at the signing ceremony, they added all these new demands that you cannot also have a deal, a trade deal with Russia. And you have to take all these additional loans from the International Monetary Fund. And this president, Yanukovych, said, well, geez, I feel like a bride who showed up at my wedding to be greeted with a prenuptial agreement. And now I kind of lost the mood and I don't really feel like marrying you anymore.

You're exactly right, Scott. I remember when he was quoted as saying that. Look, if anybody's in the deep state, it's Anthony Blinken, who is the current Secretary of State. Do you think he wants a war to pull Joe Biden's feet out of the fire because of his domestic failures? No, I mean, well, again, see, it comes down to this. The Americans' accusation is that the Russians are prepared to invade and conquer Ukraine, but that's just not true, right? That's American hype. What the Russians were doing is building up their forces on the other side of the line in reaction to America's escalations in Ukraine, in sending more and more arms there and sailing our fleet into the Black Sea and flying

our bombers right off of their coast and this kind of thing. So they decided, okay, if you're being more provocative, then we'll build up our forces in response. As you just said, the Ron Paul quote about the Chinese in Mexico or something like that. Then the Americans say, oh, see, they're building up preparing to invade. But so in other words, Antony Blinken is Homer Simpson with his bear spray, claiming to keep all the bears away. But they're not coming anyway. The whole thing is a provocation. And the truth of this can be seen in the fact that in the worst part of the war in the Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, in the aftermath of the coup of 2014, at the very beginning of 2015, the Donbass region, Donetsk and Luhansk, held a plebiscite, essentially a referendum, where they voted in a supermajority vote to join the Russian Federation. And then Vladimir Putin

told them, no, you're not welcome. And he could have at that point, Judge, essentially could have changed the border with a magic marker and said, this is part of the Russian Federation. Now, at that point, that part of the country was outside of the control of Kiev. And he could have just said, this, Scott, are nowhere in the media today, not in the conservative media, not in the liberal media. Obviously, LewRockwell.com and other places like that, we libertarians talk about it. It makes me wonder if the elite, if the establishment wants some sort of war. Well, for the same reason, for the Orwellian reason that a big government always needs a war, they need to be fighting somebody, war is the health of the state, war lets them raise taxes, war causes the public to be a little, except for we dissidents, for the public to be more pliant and accept more restraints on their liberty. I almost am feeling that. So stated differently, why isn't the average American familiar with this history?

Well, you know, I think more and more people are. And I think, you know, the power elite in America of all factions, they just cannot escape the truth that the ultimate phrase to describe our crisis here was coined by Dwight David Eisenhower, the Supreme Ally Commander of United Nations forces in Europe in World War II, turned two-term Republican President of the United States of America. And on his last day in office, he said, we have to be wary of the combine

of the military industrial complex. Put very simply, sounds like a conspiracy theory if you heard it from a leftist, but coming from Dwight Eisenhower, you know, it is what it is. The arms manufacturers do everything they can. It costs them almost pennies, you know, millions, only millions of dollars to finance the think tanks and to finance the congressmen and the senators to keep hundreds of billions, in fact, even trillions of dollars coming their way. You may have been familiar with the new Wall Street Journal report that just came out, I think, two weeks ago that said Afghanistan, which was kind of the smaller war compared to Iraq War II, right? Afghanistan, they sent the contractors there, particularly Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Atomics, General Dynamics.

They made $3 trillion off of the war in Afghanistan. Nobody else got anything out of it at all. But these connected companies did. Is the ideological war against the military industrial complex in the United States a hopeless one? No, no, it is not. And frankly, I got to say, Judge, the greatest thing that Donald Trump ever did was because he had to, he was running against George Bush's brother in the primaries. He just went all out against the military industrial complex, which he called it by name and said the war industries, they love war. You can't deny it. And he also attacked America's wars in the Middle East. So this is the worst decision any American president ever made was

in George W. Bush decided to knock over the whole Middle East, not just Iraq, but just go over there. And when he said that, it's the same thing that Ron Paul did in 2008 and 2012. Donald Trump just hit it all the way home that for conservative American patriotic Republicans, you can hate the American empire. There's nothing to cheer for here. There's no victory, as Donald Trump said. What have we gotten for all of this? Nothing. And so the mood really, really has changed on the right toward America first, Judge. I wonder if the mood has changed on the right because there's such antipathy towards the very incompetent current democratic administration i mean trump himself used drones to kill people not the extent that barack obama did he didn't kill americans like barack obama did he didn't bomb a a dam like joe biden did with kill which killed countless people so

many people are dead we don't even know the number in syria but he did use drones to kill people, which violates the constitution, which violates international law. Is there a temptation or a lust on the part of presidents to kill? Well, I do think that there is, you know, if you go back to H.W. Bush, when he started Iraq War I, in fact, this might have been from Panama. There was a New York Times reporter named Appelman who wrote that this is the rite of passage for all American presidents, the letting of blood. And this is the newspaper record. This is the official point of view of the American establishment. Remember when Donald Trump attacked the Assad regime in Syria. Now he'd been bombing ISIS targets and other targets in Syria. But when he attacked

the Syrian state over the fake gas attacks of 2017 and 18, the media absolutely cheered. They said Donald Trump became president today. Here they were saying that he was a traitorous agent of the Kremlin. And then later that afternoon, wow, what a leader. And Brian Williams, of course, quoted a Leonard Cohen song, twisted out of context to praise the beauty of our cruise missiles being launched from our battleships at sea. And there is, especially among the media and I think among the whole political class, look at the end of the day, Judge, what is the state? It's the war power. That's what it is. And if you have that power in your hand and you don't exercise it, then you go down in history as a loser, a wimp, a nobody, a nothing. As George W. Bush said, all great presidents are war presidents.

Correct. If you look at these lists that come out by academics, it doesn't mean anything to you and me and the people watching and listening to us now, but the New York Times and unfortunately the public school history books will include it. Great presidents are war presidents and fledgling presidents, candidates for president, all know that. Could you imagine if Tom Cotton were in the White House right now? We'd have 100,000 troops in Ukraine and we'd be provoking Vladimir Putin. I don't know. I'm not as optimistic as you, Scott. I think that the war machine in America

is so integral to the government. I mean, government is a monopoly of force in a geographic area. That's Ludwig von Mises' definition of it. It was as true when he said it as it is today. I don't know that we're ever going to have a Ron Paul-like or Scott Horton-like mentality in the White House. I sometimes fear, I often fear the American public likes a Theodore Roosevelt tub thumper. Look at how strong I am. Look at how proud I made you by vanquishing, fill in the blanks, some created enemy like George W. Bush created Iraq as an enemy. Right. Yeah, look, I think, I mean, obviously you're right that they're in the poll position now. But I guess I look at it like this. In fact, there have been studies like this that just show that public opinion doesn't count. What counts is lobbying. What counts is organized political pressure by groups

that can flex some financial power. But I believe that there is a major exception to that, and that is the warfare state. And you mentioned the drone wars earlier. Why the big focus on drone wars? Because if Barack Obama had continued W. Bush- occupations with the entire army and Marine Corps infantry on the ground like that. The American people absolutely would not have stood for it. So they retreated to drones. Right. This is we're going to go from big invasions to these so-called scalpels and this kind of thing. But you look at in the two major wars, we've had quite a few, but the two major wars of our era, Iraq and Afghanistan, that millions of Americans go and serve in those wars and then come home and see that they got absolutely nothing out of it. That both wars were absolutely catastrophe, total failure in every way, despite all of the promises about how valorous this all was.

The truth is just too laid bare. We really have ourselves to blame. I mean, Barack Obama killed Americans with drones because Eric Holder, his then attorney general, told him he could. I saw the memo that Holder wrote. They sent it to NBC News and then it spread all over the place. And I saw it when I was at fox it was absurd a first year law student wouldn't have written such a piece of garbage it basically likened killing this person was born in new mexico and his 16 year old son was born in virginia while they were seated at an outdoor cafe he likened killing this guy who'd never been charged with a crime wasn't indicted wasn't

wanted there wasn't a search warrant for him to shooting at a bank robber who was fleeing a bank and shooting back at the police. I mean, that type of analogy would have flunked criminal law 101. And yet the Attorney General of the United States told the President of the United States, a former lecturer in the Constitution at the University of Chicago, that he could get away with it. He got away with it and nobody complained except a Locke's father who basically said, I told you so. Yep. Although remember, Judge, at that time, the right was dominated by John McCain and Lindsey Graham and their point of view. All the talk radio agreed with their point of view. the Republican Party, their entire position was that Barack Obama is not tough enough. He's not macho enough.

He doesn't kill people enough. He ain't bad enough. But now that's really changed, especially with his successor, Joe Biden, sitting in the chair. You get much more of the spirit remember we did have this toward uh well i guess about the middle of obama in 2013 when obama wanted to attack syria over the first major fake sarin attack and it was the american right really folded their arms and said no we don't want to do this led by brightbart.com which was under control steve bannon at the time and others and the republican congressman this is before donald trump came with all his denouncements of the W. Bush doctrine. This is still during Obama. And the Republican right, the Republican constituents let the Congress know we're

just absolutely against this at this point. And I think that was really the beginning of the sea change on the right. And so and it's mixed now. Right. You have right now the chair of the Republican National Committee is a lady named McDaniel, I believe, who is Mitt Romney's niece. And she's a hawk. And she says, oh, Joe Biden is so weak. And that's why Vladimir Putin is taking advantage of him. But you know what? There's a guy running for governor, for example, in Texas right now, running to the right of Greg Abbott in the primary, hardcore on immigration, hardcore on all right-wing. And he absolutely denounced intervention in Ukraine and the use of the National Guard. And so he would protect the Texas Guard from being used for such things and all this kind of thing. So that America First sentiment is really rising up now. You're speaking about Allen West. No, I'm sorry.

I forget his name offhand. I can check for you, but it's okay. I do have a very interesting because I often wonder you and I are deep into Don Huffington. This is his name, sir. What's his name? Huffington. Don Huffington. Okay. Don Huffings is his name, sir. What's his name? Huffings, Don Huffings. Okay, I do know the name.

I often wonder where conservative Republicans are. I mean, I watched your debate against Bill Kristol. And by the way, you slaughtered him. You clobbered him. But I'm a little biased. I couldn't be neutral. If Gene Epstein had asked me to moderate that debate, I probably would have said, I can't be neutral. I want to punch Kristol in the nose would have said, I can't be neutral.

I want to punch Crystal in the nose. But does Bill, I'm exaggerating, does Bill Crystal, does that attitude that American empire and American glory is what the people want and we must give them what they want, is that endemic to the right wing of the Republican Party today? Or is the right wing of the Republican Party like you saying enough is enough? Oh, I think that by far the polls show that the people are with us. In fact, going back even to 2013, Judge, to just after the Afghan war surge was winding down in mid Obama, you had a high 60% super majorities of the American people, near 70% of the American people said that we should have never fought the wars at all. Nevermind. We want out of there now. We should have never done either of them. And here's the real rub, the troops, the actual veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars, they answer this question the same way in even higher numbers than the general population. When Ron Paul was running for the Republican nomination, he had more donations from veterans than all the other Republicans put together.

In 08 and in 12. Yes. War is a racket, but it's a racket that it is so integral to the American system right now, the military-industrial complex. Without people like you continually beating the anti-war drum, I think things would be even worse. Scott, it's a pleasure. We've got to do this again. We've been going for 22 minutes.

We've got to do it again. Happy any time to. I can see from the comments that are coming in, you're very popular with my viewers and that's no surprise. Great. Well, thanks very much, Judge. Appreciate that a lot. Of course. Judge Napolitano, judging freedom.